Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Alan H. Cadwallader, "What's A Single Man Blathering About? Jesus On Marriage"
Alan H. Cadwallader, "What's A Single Man Blathering About? Jesus On Marriage"
Alan H. Cadwallader, "What's A Single Man Blathering About? Jesus On Marriage"
ALAN H. CADWALLADER
The church throughout its history has laid claim to Jesus’ teaching about marriage. It
has dubbed the declared distillations to be the “dominical words on marriage.” The
only problem is that historical criticism has left contemporary readers with no cer-
tainty about what Jesus actually said; literary critics have destabilised whether Jesus’
words on marriage were ever intended to be transtemporal; textual critics have demon-
strated the impossibility of nailing down any fixed teaching and ideological critics
have shown the vested interests of scribes in shaping the meaning of the text from the
very beginning. Marriage, it seems, is a Rorschach test completely subject to the
needs and interests of those who venture into looking at it. Consequently Jesus can
relegate marriage to a practice not even worthy of the resurrection, prize it open to
multiple spouses whether contemporaneous or sequential, enforce asymmetrical
pairings based on gender, and generally fall in with whatever state or church decisions
might be. “Dominical words on marriage” proves to be a house built on sand.
The substance of this article seeks to demonstrate that the grounds upon
which much biblical interpretation, ecclesiastical dogma, and historical
assumption about marriage are established are not the rock of immovable
surety but the sand of shifting understandings. Consequently, the formation
of a Christian understanding and practice of marriage lies in the hands of
competing interests that have been operational from the origin of the Christ-
movement(s) and throughout the complex life of Christianity. Christian mar-
riage, therefore, is an ongoing experiment and contest, precisely because that
is the lifeblood of its conception. The assumption in contemporary scholar-
ship that the Gospel(s) delivers a dominical word about marriage and divorce
is fundamentally flawed. The suspicion that there were fissures in this domin-
ical word arises because the Christian church throughout its history has not
been able either to live to that dominical word or to agree about its parame-
ters and its realisation. Nonetheless, the effort to discipline and absolutise
shows little sign of being exhausted, even if the extent and mode of applica-
tion continues to invite experimentation.
Alan H. Cadwallader is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Public and Contextual Theology,
Charles Sturt University, Canberra, Australia.
148
© 2019 Religious History Association
JESUS ON MARRIAGE 149
A recent collection of essays on marriage in Europe from the Renaissance
to the early modern period provides us with a launching pad for the investi-
gation. The volume was striking for the range of expressions of marriage that
a scouring of both canonical and legal regulation and judicial decisions rev-
ealed.1 The editor, Silvana Menchi, was at pains to insist that the expression
“Christian marriage,” misdirects analysis. Rather, the evidence underscores
the variegated expressions of marriage. The value of harvesting judicial
records rather than concentrating on legislative and dogmatic pronounce-
ments (as a number of the essays showed) is that “singular cases” come to
the fore that demonstrate that canonical generalities were frequently removed
from, even at loggerheads with, the actual practice of couples and families.
Multifaceted contests betray the interests of wider groups — states, churches,
and families — all vying to discipline coupling. The Protestant–Catholic
divide is the mega-screen of cinematic battles, but this should not obscure
the skirmishes within ecclesiastical traditions and political demarcations (not
least in France’s refusal to adopt the marriage decrees of the Council of
Trent). The effort to make marriage uniform in this period achieved the
opposite result, returning us to the proposition that marriage is rather about
marriages.2 Marriage is an agonistic arena, where the rules are morphing
constantly, indeed experimenting, in response to a variety of interests and
forces.
My particular concern lies less in the historical analyses of this period
(1400 to 1800), valuable and enlightening as they are. Rather, I was
intrigued by the uncritical appeal to a more distant Christian tradition by
intellectual players of the time and by contemporary historians. It would be
misleading to suggest that there was general agreement on the meaning and
application of New Testament material on marriage; however, there was
general, albeit tacit agreement that such New Testament material was avail-
able as a solid base on which to build one’s particular teaching on marriage.
The citations of New Testament references are surprisingly thin in the col-
lection, almost as if they can be assumed as an immovable starting point.
When they are cited, the presumptions behind their use become clear. So,
for example, Charles Donahue makes three assertions that reveal a founda-
tion that has not been interrogated: firstly, that monogamy was the Jewish
practice at the time of Jesus; secondly, that Greek and Roman practice and
law were similar; thirdly, that the indissolubility of Christian marriage was
derived from the teaching of Jesus found in the New Testament, even if
later Protestant teaching did permit a heavily circumscribed access to
divorce, also reliant upon an undifferentiated New Testament foundation
(Mt 5:32, 19:9; 1 Cor 7).3
I do not engage source-critical or form-critical problems but take the textus recep-
tus to be the governing word — in part because the sayings that the teaching
Church has historically taken as dominical belong to this text (as opposed to a sub-
set of ipsissima verba distinguished on scholarly grounds from spuria) and in part
4. H. Wunder, “Marriage in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation from the Fifteenth
to the Eighteenth Century: Moral, Legal and Political Order,” in Menchi, Marriage in
Europe, 71.
5. S. S. Menchi, “Conclusion,” in Menchi, Marriage in Europe, 335.
6. Donahue, “Legal Background,” 49.
7. Donahue, “Legal Background,” 42.
8. Compare, however, M. Porter, Sex, Marriage and the Church: Patterns of Change (North
Blackburn: Dove, 1996) 16–17.
9. So, for example, J. Gibson, The Temptations of Jesus in Early Christianity (London: T & T
Clark, 2004), 284; E. E. Ellis, Pauline Theology: Ministry and Society (Eugene, OR: Wipf and
Stock, 1997), 81. Compare the language of “codification” in D. B. Capes, “Paul, Jesus Tradition
in,” in Encyclopedia of the Historical Jesus, ed. C. A. Evans (New York: Routledge, 2014), 448.
10. A. McCormack, The Term “Privilege”: A Textual Study of its Meaning and Use in the 1983
Code of Canon Law (Rome: Editrice Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 1997), 160; D. Farrow,
Desiring a Better Country: Forays in Political Theology (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University
Press, 2015), 135; G. Wainwright, Doxology: A Systematic Theology (London: Epworth,
1980), 78.
Here an edited Greek New Testament from 1527 (oddly, not the Vulgate)
is combined with the fiction of an unchanged interpretation by the church
from the time when everything related to teaching about marriage came from
the Lord (Dominus) Jesus. His pronouncements are unchanging, indeed must
be, in order to preserve his divinity and the rightness of the divine call —
curiously making marriage an invitation to “sacrifice and hardship.” History
— involvement in time — has no formative standing. The biblical text
becomes as asomatic as the angels sometimes credited with its delivery (Acts
7:53; Gal 3:19). Not only is this theologically suspect even in terms of the
confessional background from which it emanates,12 but it flies in the face of
critical approaches that guide New Testament scholarship. The drive for dis-
cipline and unification of practice is manifest, but the rationale abrogates his-
torical and critical realities.
To illuminate this proposition that a single, dominical marriage precept is
a later fabrication, the sayings of Jesus in Mark’s Gospel dealing with mar-
riage (and divorce)13 will be examined in relation to their text, historical con-
text, literary structure and ideological function. Those sayings come in two
main blocks: Mk 10:1–12 and 12:18–27, though the Mark 10 passage,
dubbed the dominical teaching on marriage, will receive most attention.
11. P. Mankowski, “Dominical Teaching on Divorce and Remarriage: The Biblical Data,” in
Remaining in the Truth of Christ: Marriage and Communion in the Catholic Church,
ed. R. Dodaro (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2014), 57. From a Protestant position: S. B. Clark,
Man and Woman in Christ: An Examination of the Role of Men and Women in Light of Scripture
and the Social Sciences (Ann Arbor: Servant Books, 1980), 286.
12. See A. H. Cadwallader, “History as Bulwark, Bridge and Bulldozer: Dei Verbum and Ecu-
menical, Biblical Endeavor,” in God’s Word and the Church’s Council, ed. C. Monaghan and
M. O’Brien (Adelaide: ATF Press, 2014), 207–24.
13. The word sometimes translated as “separate” (χωρίζω as in 1 Cor 7:10–11 NRSV) is a stan-
dard expression (along with ἀπολύω and ἀποστάσιον of Mk 10:2, 4) for divorce: BGU 1.251,
4.1049, 1102, 1103; P. Ryl. 2.154; cf P. Ryl. 2.154 (the substantive). The term was still being
used in the sixth century in Christian divorces: P. Cair. Masp. 3.67311; P. Lond. 5.1713.
14. D. C. Parker, The Living Text of the Gospels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997), 78–79. Strictly, Parker provides seven alternatives; I have combined his fifth and sixth
variations (being very little different) and made his seventh the sixth item here.
1. If a woman divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery;
and if a man divorces his wife, he commits adultery.
2. If a woman divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery;
and if a man divorces his wife and marries another, he commits adultery.
3. Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her,
and if she, divorcing her husband, marries another, she commits adultery.
4. Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her;
and if a woman goes out from her husband and marries another, she commits
adultery.
5. Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her,
and if a woman divorces her husband and then marries another, she commits
adultery.
6. If a man divorces his wife and marries another, he commits adultery against
her; and if a woman separates from her husband and marries another, she com-
mits adultery against him; likewise also he who marries a woman divorced
from her husband commits adultery.
15. A scribal mistake (parablepsis from the καί opening the phrase in verse 7b to the καί begin-
ning verse 8) is sometimes credited for the loss in some manuscripts of καὶ προσκολληθήσεται
πρὸς τὴν γυνα~ικα αὐτο~ υ. See W. Loader, The Septuagint, Sexuality and the New Testament:
Case Studies on the Impact of the LXX in Philo and the New Testament (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 2004), 79–80.
16. J. K. Elliott, “Manuscripts, the Codex and the Canon,” Journal for the Study of the New Tes-
tament 63 (1996): 113; compare S. E. Porter, “What Do We Know and How Do We Know It?
Reconstructing Early Christianity from its Manuscripts,” in Early Christian Origins and Greco-
Roman Culture: Social and Literary Contexts for the New Testament, ed. S. E. Porter and A. W.
Pitts (TENT 9; Leiden: Brill, 2013), 41–70.
17. Parker, The Living Text of the Gospels, 79; R. H. Gundry, Mark: A Commentary on His
Apology for the Cross (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), 370; D. B. Peabody, “Reading Mark
from the Perspective of Different Synoptic Source Hypotheses: Historical, Redactional and
Theological Implications,” in New Studies in the Synoptic Problem, Oxford Conference, April
2008, ed. P. Foster, A. Gregory, J. S. Kloppenborg, and J. Verheyden (Leuven: Peeters, 2011),
180 n49. More on this historical issue below.
18. Robert Derrenbacker suggests that Matthew combined the Q-saying with the recalled word-
ing of Mark; see “The ‘External and Psychological Conditions under which the Synoptic Gos-
pels Were Written’: Ancient Compositional Practices and the Synoptic Problem,” in Foster et al.,
New Studies in the Synoptic Problem, 451.
19. E. J. Epp, “Text-Critical, Exegetical, and Socio-Cultural Factors Affecting the Junia/Junias
Variation in Romans 16,7,” in New Testament Textual Criticism and Exegesis, Festchrift for
J. Delobel, ed. A. Denoux (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2002), 228.
20. M. E. Boring, “The ‘Minor Agreements’ and their Bearing on the Synoptic Problem,” in
Foster et al., New Studies in the Synoptic Problem, 246.
21. S. Davies, “Women in the Third Gospel and New Testament Apocrypha,” in “Women Like
This”: New Perspectives on Jewish Women in the Greco-Roman World, ed. A-J. Levine (Atlanta,
GA: Scholars, 1991), 187.
22. λἐγω δὲ ὑμ~ιν ὅτι ὃς ἄν ἀπολύσῃ τὴν γυνα~ικα αὐτο~ υ μὴ ἐπὶ πορνείᾳ καὶ γαμήσῃ ἄλλην
μοιχᾶται (Nestle-Aland28).
23. For a comparison of all the Gospel sayings about divorce, see D. W. Jorgensen, Treasure
Hidden in a Field: Early Christian Reception of the Gospel of Matthew (Berlin: de Gruyter,
2016), 208–15.
24. Parker gives eight variants: The Living Text of the Gospels, 85–86.
25. Parker, The Living Text of the Gospels, 92.
Monogamy
The default interpretation of Mark 10 is that Jesus was a creature of his Jew-
ish environment and therefore required monogamy.26 It is probably assumed
that death delivered release either from marriage or into a serial monogamy
such as in Mk 12:20–22 (cf. 1 Cor 7:39).27 Rabbinical teachings certainly
came to promote monogamous marriage, but the period of these teachings is
the end of the second / beginning of the third centuries and later. It is only
with great care that we can trace some sayings back to the time of Jesus.28
The sayings did arise in the context of debates about marriage, that is, in a
context where the push towards uniformity was in process. Rabbinical Juda-
ism inherited this push from earlier Jewish groups and carried it to comple-
tion. Polygamy, at least for members of the Qumran community of the first
century, was rejected even though the practice is acknowledged in its writ-
ings.29 The commitment of the community to differentiate itself likely
prompted such self-definition. A number of leading Jerusalem priests seem
to have been polygamists or at least bigamists, as also some in the Herodian
dynasty.30 Indeed, in the life of early Christ groups, polygamy appears to
have been an accepted if handicapping factor for Christians.31 One cannot
assume that Roman legal requirements of monogamy (but not at the expense
of polygyny)32 were adopted throughout the empire. Roman law, especially
in the early imperial period, tolerated multiple legal systems.33 Nevertheless,
even when dressed in arguments citing Scripture, the Roman legal promotion
of monogamy was a considerable inducement to conformity for rabbis.34
Enough survives in the rabbinical writings to show that, even if sometimes
disapproved, polygamy was a lively, if eventually terminated, option.35
26. See, for example, P. J. Tomson, “Divorce Halakah in Paul and the Jesus Tradition,” in The
New Testament and Rabbinic Literature, ed. R. Bieringer, F. G. Garcia, D. Pollefeyt, and P. J.
Tomson (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 322.
27. Compare m. Qidd. 1.1.
28. See J. Neusner, The Rabbinic Traditions about the Pharisees before 70, Part I: The Masters
(Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2005 [1971]); A. I. Baumgarten, “Rabbinic Literature as a Source
for the History of Jewish Sectarianism in the Second Temple Period,” Dead Sea Discoveries
2 (1995): 14–57; P. Fredriksen, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews: A Jewish Life and the
Emergence of Christianity (New York: Knopf, 1999), 18–41.
29. Damascus Document (Zadokite Fragments) 4.20–5.2. See W. Loader, The Dead Sea Scrolls
and Sexuality (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 113–19.
30. tYebam 1.10; bYebam 15b; yYebam 1.5, 3a; cf Josephus Vita 75. For the Herodians, Jose-
phus gives quite specific lists: BJ 1.24.2, Ant 17.1.2.
31. David Daube, The New Testament and Rabbinic Judaism (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1956),
76 — see 1 Tm 3:2, Ti 1:6. Other commentators read the texts as a directive that blocked the
divorced or serial monogamists from church leadership; see C. S. Keener, … And Marries
Another: Divorce and Remarriage in the Teaching of the New Testament (Peabody: Hendrickson,
1991), 81–103.
32. W. Scheidel, “Monogamy and Polygyny,” in A Companion to Families in the Greek and
Roman Worlds, ed. B. Rawson (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 108–15.
33. See C. Ando, “Roman Pluralism in Practice,” in The Oxford Handbook of Roman Law and
Society, ed. C. Ando et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 283–93.
34. So D. Instone-Brewer, “Jesus’ Old Testament Basis for Monogamy,” in The Old Testament
in the New Testament: Essays in Honour of J. L. North, ed. S. Moyise (JSNTs 189; Sheffield:
Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 79, 101. Polygamy was explicitly outlawed in 393 CE (Justinian
Code 1.9.7).
35. See, for example, mKet 10.5, bYom 18b, bYeb 21b, 44a; compare also Josephus Ant
17.1.2, BJ 1.24.2; JustinM Dial 141. Criticism of polygamy is clear in bAb 2.5, bYeb44a.
Agency in Divorce
Another document from the time of the second Jewish revolt has forced a
reconsideration of the divorce proscriptions in Mk 10:11–12. As noted
above, Mark is said to extend Jesus’ saying so that it reflected Roman juridi-
cal permission for a wife’s initiation of proceedings.48 After all, Josephus
claimed this would contravene Jewish law.49 But a papyrus from a cave
located above Naḥal Ḥever, a wadi south of En Gedi that feeds into the Dead
Sea, seems to indicate the initiative of the wife, Shelmazion, in securing a
divorce, not simply establishing permission to ask for a divorce which the
husband might then initiate.50 The papyrus has also been interpreted in this
latter sense.51 It is significant, however, that the Aramaic Targum (Jonathan)
to Jeremiah, probably a second or third century CE compilation, made a tell-
ing addition to the reference to God’s bill of divorce to Israel in Jer 3:8, com-
paring God’s action to that of “men [who] give a letter of divorce and put
43. See C. Wassen, Women in the Damascus Document (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Litera-
ture, 2005), 116. Significantly, the Damascus Document testimonia combine Gn 1:27, 7:9 (the
pairs of animals) and Dt 17:17 (restriction on the number of king’s wives). The combination in
Mk 10:6–8 (Gn 1:27, 2:24) is different. Any slick transfer of the Qumran protest against polyg-
amy to Mark’s Gospel is problematic.
44. Loader, The Septuagint, Sexuality and the New Testament, 80–81; W. Loader, The New Tes-
tament on Sexuality (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012), 278.
45. Josephus Ant 17.1.2, BJ 1.24.2. Josephus calls it “ancestral custom” (πάτριον) not law; else-
where, he describes intermarriage as against “ancestral laws” (πάτρια νόμιμα, Ant 20.7.2).
46. A. H. Cadwallader, “The Markan / Marxist Struggle for the Household: Juliet Mitchell and
the challenge to patriarchal/familial ideology,” in Marxist Feminist Criticism of the Bible,
ed. R. Boer and J. kland (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2008), 157.
47. D. Martin, The Corinthian Body (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 176, followed
by A. C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (NIGTC; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
2000), 468. Compare Loader, The New Testament on Sexuality, 192, who avoids the logical
conundrum that if consorting with a prostitute “creates oneness with someone other than Christ”
then so also must Christian marriage. Elsewhere, he fudges the distinction between unity in
Christ and unity in marriage: W. Loader, Making Sense of Sex: Attitudes towards Sexuality in
Early Jewish and Christian Literature (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), 17.
48. Daube, The New Testament and Rabbinic Judaism, 362–69; B. Incigneri, The Gospel to the
Romans (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 98–99, 270; Jorgensen, Treasure Hidden in a Field, 209–10.
49. Josephus Ant 15.7.10. Tal Ilan argues that Josephus is eyeing his Roman audience: “Notes
and Observations on a Newly Published Divorce Bill from the Judean Desert,” Harvard Theolog-
ical Review 89 (1996): 202.
50. P. Ṣe’elim 13; see Ilan, “Notes and Observations”; Collins, “Marriage, Divorce and Family,”
120–21.
51. A. Schremer, “Divorce in Papyrus Ṣe’elim 13 Once Again: A Reply to Tal Ilan,” Harvard
Theological Review 91 (1998): 193–202; Loader, The New Testament on Sexuality, 56–57.
52. Translation from R. Hayward, The Targum of Jeremiah (Aramaic Bible 12; Edinburgh: T &
T Clark, 1987), 55.
53. The divorce by a Christian of her husband mentioned by Justin Martyr (2 Apol 2.6) is com-
plicated by whether she was Jewish and the jurisdiction she was relying upon: see B. S. Jackson,
“The Divorce of the Herodian Princesses: Jewish Law, Roman Law, or Palace Law?” in Josephus
and Jewish History in Flavian Rome and Beyond, ed. J. Sievers and G. Lembi (JSJs 104; Lei-
den: Brill, 2005), 349–54. Compare the expulsion (divorce?) of Justa by a similarly reprobate
husband; thereafter she lived as a “widow” (ClemHom 2.20).
54. TAD B3.3 (where the “silver of hatred,” that is, payment for divorce, is within the agency of
each party); see Instone-Brewer, Divorce and Remarriage in the Bible, 79–80; B. Porten, et al.,
The Elephantine Papyri in English: Three Millennia of Cross-Cultural Continuity and Change
(Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011), 209–11.
55. Josephus Ant 15.7.10 (Salome divorced Costobarus); Ant 18.5.4 (Herodias divorced one son
of Herod “the Great,” Philip, to marry another, Antipas). A third example — of Berenice from
King Polemo of Cilicia — is ambiguous in Josephus’ report (Ant 20.7.3). Berenice is simply
described as “deserting” (καταλείπω) him.
56. Only Josephus Ant 16.10.4 of a (forged?) letter.
57. See, for example, IG 2.1415, 1421; SEG 30.93; P.Corn. 1; P.Col. 7.170; P.Genova 2.62,
which cover a variety of official documents. The word can be used for a private letter (P.Petr.
2.15; P.Mert. 2.90).
58. Compare Jackson, “The Divorce of the Herodian Princesses.”
65. F. Belo, A Materialist Reading of the Gospel of Mark (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1981), 4–5,
his emphasis.
66. Livingstone, Society, the Sacred and Scripture, 60.
67. Loader, The Septuagint, Sexuality and the New Testament, 80–81.
68. J. W. Wevers, Notes on the Greek Text of Genesis (SCS 35; Atlanta: Scholars Press,
1993), 34–35.
69. Omitted in אB Ψ 892* 2427 l48. Gundry favours this shorter text: Mark, 530.
70. Wevers, Notes on the Greek Text of Genesis, 35.
71. Daube notes the interplay of singular and plural: The New Testament and Rabbinic Juda-
ism, 72–73.
A Controversy Story
The form of the story in verses 2–12 is usually categorised as a controversy
story.72 Sometimes, the Pharisees are interpreted as part of the controversy,
sometimes not.73 When they are included, Jesus turns into one of the sectar-
ian voices of first-century Jewish ideas, albeit the best according to Christian
reproduction. The form in which the “debate” (as it becomes in such inter-
pretation) is cast is also sometimes structured according to a traditional Phar-
isaical scheme.74 When the structure omits verse 1 from consideration and
does not evaluate their test/temptation (πειράζοντες, v. 2), then all we have
here is a “history of exegesis” evolving through debates.
72. See D. Burkett, An Introduction to the New Testament and the Origins of Christianity
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 164.
73. See Loader, The New Testament on Sexuality, 273.
74. Daube, The New Testament and Rabbinic Judaism, 141–50. Sometimes his unhindered
application of later rabbinic materials to first-century Christian controversy stories is challenged.
Nonetheless, his interpretation has been influential: see B. Witherington, The Gospel of Mark: A
Socio-Rhetorical Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 275.
75. Gundry, Mark, 529; C. Focant, The Gospel According to Mark: A Commentary (Eugene,
OR: Pickwick, 2012), 398.
76. H. Rhee, Early Christian Literature: Christ and Culture in the Second and Third Centuries
(London: Routledge, 2005), 114.
77. The daughter of King Aratus IV of the Nabataeans was the first wife of Herod Antipas. She
barely escaped with her life once Antipas’ eyes were lured to Herodias; see Josephus Ant
18.5.1–3.
78. R. S. Kraemer, “Implicating Herodias and Her Daughter in the Death of John the Baptizer:
A (Christian) Theological Strategy,” Journal of Biblical Literature 125, no. 2 (2006): 321–49.
79. A. D. Jacobson, “Divided Families and Christian Origins,” in The Gospel Behind the Gos-
pels, ed. R. A. Piper (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 370–71.
80. See J. Birdsall, “The Western Text in the Second Century,” in Gospel Traditions in the Sec-
ond Century, ed. W. Peterson (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 3–17.
81. Gundry, Mark, 536–57; J. G. Crossley, The Date of Mark’s Gospel: Insight from the Law in
Earliest Christianity (London: T & T Clark, 2004), 176.
82. See A. H. Cadwallader, “‘In Go(l)d We Trust’: Literary and Economic Currency Exchange
in the Debate over Caesar’s Coin (Mark 12:13–17),” Biblical Interpretation 14 (2006): 486–507.
removed from the mythic realm in Mark’s Gospel so also has resurrection.
Resurrection is directed towards this world, not the next. Accordingly, it is
not merely that creation edicts have no absolute hold (the Mark 10 passage)
but also, neither does a distant future; rather the resurrection means that
everything has changed in the present.83
The narrative arrangement of the death of John the Baptist shapes our
reconsideration. The execution is prefaced by word reaching Antipas about
the mission of Jesus’ disciples (Mk 6:14–16). His response is to see John
resurrected — manifest in the present power of word and deed. Accordingly,
the resurrection destabilises marriage. Luke’s reworking of Mark’s material
makes blatant the subtlety. He has Jesus say, “those who are credited as wor-
thy to attain to that age and to the resurrection from the dead, neither marry
nor are given in marriage.” (Lk 20:35). Here is the foundation for privileging
celibate life over marriage84 and encouragement to separate from spouse in
order to pursue that life.
Conclusion
What has been argued here is that the foundation on which ecclesiastical dis-
cipline and theological absolutes dispensed about marriage have been built is
a foundation of sand. From the beginning, in text and context, the sayings
attributed to Jesus have been subject to ecclesial construction from ideologi-
cal motives. The analysis of the sayings on marriage and divorce has shown
that at the levels of text, historical setting, and literary structure, the sayings
of Jesus are highly contingent and temporally focused. The search for endur-
ing Christian values must look elsewhere. Accordingly, responsibility is
thrown back upon those who would venture into marriage and divorce —
whether for its enforcement or its practice — to acknowledge that an admis-
sion and ownership of contemporary concerns is likely to create a more
transparent and accountable approach to marriage and divorce, than a solip-
sistic appeal to a dominical saying made natural by constant repetition.
83. See S. Bachelard, “Marriage and the Sacred: Fragments Straight and Gay,” in Cadwallader,
Kaleidoscope of Pieces, 43–58.
84. T. K. Seim, “Children of the Resurrection: Perspectives on Angelic Asceticism in Luke-
Acts,” in Asceticism and the New Testament, ed. L. E. Vaage and V. L. Wimbush (New York:
Routledge, 1999), 115–26.